The Legend of Zelda: Saria's Secret
by Sophia Marsh
Summary: What if Hyrule really existed? Better than that, what if it existed on this Earth? How about below the Pacific Ocean? This is the story of a girl who discovers its existence, and of her quest to return to her home...


I'm going to add a disclaimer now before I forget. This disclaimer applies to all future chapters as well as this one: I don't own Zelda, Tetris, Chu Chu Rocket, Metroid, Virtual Villagers, or anything else that's protected under copyright that I might happen to mention over the course of this story.

In those days, a long time ago, there was only one way to get to our island. In southern California was a small dock. From there, there was a ferry-type boat to Hawaii. The reason you had to take this boat was that the harbor it led to also connected to a different service, which would let you take a two-day ride on a medium-size boat to our island's small dock, which could hold only two boats. The other boat was ours, which we use for our own travels.

If you got off the boat there and looked around, you would see a sprawling beach, which faded to forest on one half of the island, and which faded to grass on another. The dock was fairly close to the forest side. The grass side was otherwise separated from the forest side by a line of rocks that we put in place. On the grass side was a small farm, which grew all our fresh fruits and vegetables, except for the orchard in the forest side of the island, where we grew all the tree-fruits: bananas, oranges, peaches, and even coconuts! Our island was somewhat of a tropical paradise.

The house was... let's say it belittled the word mansion. My family had lived there for four generations, having come there by accident in 1924 (Of course, we weren't a family then, just a large group of people that happened to crash-land on a mysterious island... just like Virtual Villagers). In all that time, the house that started as a one-room rain shelter had expanded to have over sixty rooms for its eleven inhabitants: My father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my grandmother, my aunt and uncle's two children, me, my two brothers, and my baby sister. I was eight before I knew my way around the house, and even then I would keep finding rooms that I never knew existed.

Why are there only eleven people in such a large and intricate place? Well, my mother once told me that, a few years before I was born, her, her sister, their husbands, and my older brother were off on a mission with a submarine captain whose grandparents were among the original islanders. During that time, something broke out on the island, and everyone on the island at the time died. My brother was just a baby then, but he said he remembered the feeling of immense sadness that hung over the house, our family coming back and finding the island deserted and the mansion full of dead bodies. He had a cousin that he was very close to, named Lily, who had died there, and her death scarred him for life. The entire family had a huge aura of sadness, in fact, until Lita, my cousin, was born a year later. My grandmother had also survived, since she was out of the house when whatever it was happened. All she could say was that when she came back, everyone was dead, with no signs of what killed them.

Our lives on the island were somewhat modern. We got power from the waves, with a mechanism that even I didn't understand, designed by one of the original castaways who turned out to be extremely talented at mechanical engineering. He also designed our water filtration system. We made trips to the mainland twice a year, where we made a small fortune from selling some of our stocks (There have always been a few of us who had extremely accurate foresight, which we turned to our advantage on the stock market), and brought back all we could carry of American and Japanese culture (we would alternate visits between the two countries, which we were about halfway between).

Some of the things we brought from the mainland that we couldn't find here: several (I'd say twenty) televisions and three projectors, a HUGE library spanning the entire fourth floor of our house, containing about half a million books and the same number of movies, and, my favorite, seventeen video game systems with a total of several thousand games. We had a large satellite dish that got us an Internet connection for our three dozen computers and live television, too. We also had a conservatory on the fifth floor, with all sorts of exotic and rare plants from around the world. We had so many things that I often had trouble believing my good fortune.

However, isolation paid its price. I never had many friends to play with other than my cousin, as the boys in my family decided to leave the girls out... well, not all the girls, just me. Even my cousin usually played with the boys. In return, I usually played with the video games. I had a few particular favorites, from Tetris to Chu Chu Rocket, that I spent most of my time with. When my daily four hours with the television were up, I would go outside and play with my cat, which I called Miki. She was fluffy.

Most days would go something like this: I wake up, have breakfast, do my two hours of work on the small farm, have lunch, ask Lita if she'd like to play, and if she says yes, I play with her for four hours, otherwise I play video games for four hours. Sometimes I would play video games with Lita. Then, I check my email, help my mother (or my aunt – they take turns) with dinner, and help them eat it. After that everyone watches a movie that we take turns picking. Then we all read for an hour, and go to bed. My sister, of course, doesn't do most of the stuff I mentioned, since she can't even stand, let alone work, but everyone else does.

That one day, though, was special. Remember when I mentioned how to get to our island? Well, someone got to our island. But not the way I mentioned. They got there by submarine. A really big submarine, too. I could tell that they came from the rough direction of the Americas, so that was good. I hadn't brushed up on my Japanese recently, since our last trip was to America. I barely thought of that, though, because if the submarine's appearance wasn't surprising, its request was. The man who came out was the grandson-of-the-original-castaways-that-left-the-island-because-it-was-too-plain.

"Hello?" said the captain (who I recognized from his previous visits) as he stepped out of the submarine. I was on the beach, and my family came out soon afterwards. "I see you're all here," he continued, "which is a good thing, because I have a mission for one of the kids. Now, I need one of you to examine an underwater disturbance. My team has tried going out in submersibles, but none returned, and we have had minimal signals of their whereabouts. Our sonar is unable to scan the area, and we figure that a child should be best suited for this mission. Adults with more training tend to do worse on these type of missions than children with relatively no advanced training, for a ton of reasons which I'm sure all you adults know from the emails we sent you a week ago," he continued. I had gone on a mission like this once before, when I was six. That much made me the most qualified of any of the children here. "Now, who would like to volunteer?"

I boldly stepped forward. It was pretty exciting, actually. There might be something wonderful down there. _But then again,_ a voice in my head reminded me, _there might be something terrible down there._ I forced it away, trying to take an optimistic perspective on the entire ordeal. I tried to convince myself that it would go just as well as my last mission. With that in mind, I said my goodbyes to my family. I probably shed as many tears as the sum total of them did, since I didn't stop crying until long after I was gone in the submarine.

The crew was fun to be with, but since I had barely anything to do, the two days felt like two weeks. Sometimes I would go help Maria, the captain's wife, with the cooking, or go talk to Greg, who was fourteen, but most of my time was spent in dreaded anticipation. That isn't a very fun way for a girl as young as I to entertain herself, as it can be the cause of many diseases, even in adults. I had no other choice, though, since I was the only child on the ship. I had no belongings, and no friends to play with. I clung by Maria's side for most of the first day, and after that I committed myself to learning the few controls I would need to know on the submersible I would be traveling in.

I wouldn't have to worry about most of the controls, because the tether that connected me to the submarine had a cord running through it, which transmitted the video from the camera on the front of the submersible to the submarine workers. It also allowed them to somewhat-remotely control the submersible. The submersible had a full set of controls in case the tether broke, which had been known to happen in the past. I could operate the controls pretty well, especially since if the tether broke I just had to press a button which would make the submersible rapidly advance to the surface and send out an SOS signal. When it made it to the surface, there was a valve that would allow fresh air to come in. I didn't have to worry about the emergency control, though, because the chances of it being necessary were about fifty thousand to one, against.

Of course, if the tether was intact I had to do almost nothing but wait. I wouldn't need to do this if they had perfected robot submersibles, but I needed to do part of controlling the submersible, not to mention that the robot submersibles couldn't properly evaluate the situation to report back to the submarine in less-than-perfect cases. The part of controlling it that I had to do was fun, as if the submersible had been designed for children. That reminded me of the captain's words: "Adults with more training tend to do worse on these type of missions than children with relatively no advanced training, for a ton of reasons which I'm sure all you adults know from the emails we sent you a week ago." I wondered what he sent the adults. I even went through all the possibilities in my head. It couldn't have been that bad, or else my mother would have objected right off the bat.

Eventually, we reached the spot where I was to leave them. I had mixed feelings about leaving them, but all other emotion was overshadowed by the extreme anxiety I felt in my heart at what awaited me below. There was a strange airlock-type thing for the submersible. I climbed into the cockpit (or whatever it's called) of the submersible, and closed the door behind me. I was extremely glad I wasn't claustrophobic, because I was in some tight quarters.

My mission was only expected to take a few hours, so there was only a small amount of food on board for use in case of extreme emergency, but there was water, and for that, I was very glad. Somehow, seeing water around me made me thirsty. It was that way whenever I went to the beach, and it was that way when our family was in our boat in the open ocean. It would probably be much worse in a submersible whose entire front half, save for the floor and the controls, was see-through (with metal reinforcements, of course, but peripheral vision allowed any two-eyed person to see an unbroken image despite the reinforcements). That gave new meaning to the phrase my father would say sometimes when we were on our trips to or from the mainland, with ocean as far as the eye could see: _Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink._

A moment later, I was in the open ocean. When I looked up, I noticed that I could see a miniscule amount of light from the surface... in fact, the altimeter (I _think_ that's what it's called) on the submersible said that I was only about five hundred feet below sea level (That's about 150 meters, for those of you who speak Metric). I took a sip of the water, and looked around me.

I was several hundred feet under the ocean's surface, and slowly sinking, but I still marveled at the sheer beauty of all that I saw around me. To my right was a rock formation that I did not recognize, about half a mile away. It was very thin and steep, and it tapered to a point a good distance below the surface. To my left was the open ocean, but below me... below me was the most magnificent bed of coral that could have possibly existed. Apparently I was near the edge of it, because it spread out as far as I could see in every direction but behind me. It held millions of colors in unrivaled beauty, and many more colors that I never knew existed.

I spent most of my few minutes that it took to sink toward it in quiet awe of the coral structure, too amazed to say anything, for farther in on the coral, was the likeness of a beautiful castle, which the fishes must inhabit. There were high turrets and low doorways, windows of unrivaled splendor through which only water showed, and I could see, vaguely, the courtyard, which seemed like a garden from all I could tell. The minutes passed, squinting to try to see all the possible detail of the palace, but then... apparently I broke through something, because a moment later, I found myself falling, my submersible having just... vanished. The last thing I remembered was the feeling of needles in my back, and then all was darkness.

* * *

Hi everyone! If you've read my other writing, which was... pretty terrible... then know that I am writing this because I have officially given up on that. I think I even deleted the story.

Wondering where all the Zelda-ness is? You can review and guess (but I guess the summary made it obvious... oh well.), and I'll tell if you're right. Bonus points if you can guess the heroine's name. Everything will make more sense in the next chapter, which I am not going to release for a few days just so I can build up the suspense... (I'm probably going to get too pressured and release it tomorrow, though. I always do.)

See you soon. Well, I won't see you, but you'll see– oh, forget it.

~Sophia~


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